2013: Some of the Best of the Best of The Year of the Snake (an inherently subjective and incomplete list of public and personal artifacts of experience)

Joyous Happening Number One: The Birth of our Daughter, Abigail Rose!

Three releases that I've listened to over and over, despite the world being so full of great releases that we can often only take the time to listen to each once or twice:

Enemy by Skin Graft
We Know Your Body Better than You Do by Nine Volt Haunted House and 
Relentless Corpse is an Urban Myth by Relentless Corpse (which has been the only album I can write to these days).

Four splits/comps in which I was honored to be included:

Songs for Spooky, released by Live Bait Recording Foundation, Dead Peasant Insurance(DPI)-Griefhound-Fascist Insect-Extreme Noise Terrier four-way split, Exaltation Heat with Pauline Lombardo and A Christmas Gift for You Gotta Groove compilation (my band Stark Holy MAA with Mitch Ribis and Wyatt Howland contributed a short track that marks the first time Wyatt and I have been on vinyl together after almost nineteen years of collaboration!).

More releases that sounded new to my ears:

The Stop Circle of Singing by Dog Lady Island, Conrail by Conrail, The Neverending Story by Dr. Quin Medicine Woman, Counted Clock by Skin Graft and Battery Cage III  by Being.

That's surely not all - I'm lucky to hear great stuff all the time - those are just a few releases that stayed with me over these last twelve months.

My three favorite books I've read this year:  

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes and Look at Me by Jennifer Egan.

But wait, I read Look at Me every year! What else? Tampa and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting, The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates,  Already Dead by Dennis Johnson, Shelter by Jayne Anne Philips, and, more great books, oh yes, this was a great year for novels, I was fortunate to read a bunch.

I'm so grateful to everyone who participated in this blog's interview series. What wonderful stories and insights!

This year I received my MFA, and the best thing about that is it means four people have actually read my novel! My thesis committee of three wonderful writers: Imad Rahman, David Giffels and Christopher Barak, and also my brilliant mother.

Others experiences and things I'm grateful for this year:

The Tantra yoga class I took with Corissa Bragg when we were both very pregnant, the moonlight shining on my four week old daughter's face and her smile in return, the manic warmth of friends, lucid dreams, The Mysterious Black Box, The Brewing Luminous, What You Need and other great shows on WCSB and WRUW, The Rubber City Noise Cave, my great students and teachers in and out of Cleveland State University, more time with my family, the growth of  the Lean House and all things diy, local health activists, Mahall's and Now That's Class hosting regular noise events such  as Class's First Sunday Noise Series, and the monthly events at Mahalls' curated by Lisa Miralia (Lecture in a Bar, second Tuesday of each month) and Tom Orange and Dan Wenninger (Outlab: Experiments in Improvised Music, on the third Tuesday of each month), regular writing and science events at The Happy Dog (also the fact that they pay musicians, although the crowd there can be antagonistic), The growth of Black Sun Oasis, the Cleveland Print Room, the return of the label Mistake by the Lake, collaborating with Pauline Lombardo, Rob Resch, Mitch and Wyatt, and the new free-standing Hanson Record store! I took my two month old baby to a lecture at CSU by Junot Diaz, and it was wonderful. Continuing the Voice of the Valley Noise Rally and the Diamond Shiners Wassail party; although I wasn't able to go to either event, it made me happy that they rage on!

Bad Shit:

Death, sadism and suffering in Syria, the Congo, South Sudan, Afghanistan and many many more regions.  The government shut-down and all the propaganda surrounding it. Meanwhile, the ice caps are still melting, forests are still being mowed down and the massive extermination of life and diversity continues: lost languages, plants, animals, cultures. Air. Chances. We lost Lou Reed and two wonderful dog friends, Spooky and Basho. The Black Cat Factory disappeared, and I read too many half-baked reactionary trollish responses to intelligent feminist articles. I missed tons of good shows that were not well attended, although it was worth it to bring Abigail into this world. Also, I wasn't able to watch the demolition of Peabody's.

I went to few shows but a few of the performances I did catch stayed with me:

Bbob and J Guy at some sort-of Embassy show, Faangface at Now That's Class, and Iron Oxide and The Utter Darkness after a Dying Flame at The Holy Mountain. I've also enjoyed the shift in Murderous Vision's style, and the continuing refinement and control of Baat's performances. The Dreamtones's show at Akron's Porch Rocker was very pleasurable. I've enjoyed watching my husband Mitch Ribis play solid and exciting shows with Fascist Insect and Gomorrahizer, and now I'm enjoying him develop his solo project (Fascist Insect).

I am so grateful for my husband, who has been by my side for almost three years, through exhaustion and bliss and all the rest, cooking beautiful meals and making me laugh every day since the birth of our daughter.

Hopes for 2014:

Psalm Isadora coming to Ohio in September, more Tantramoon releases and recording with friends and a new solo full length, more interviews, the return of DPI for our tenth anniversary show and the return of XTerminal and of Survival of the Loudest, and our daughter learning how to walk and talk. I hope to finish drafting my second novel, Don't Fear the Night Duende.  I dream of the relocalization of economy, culture and power, a renewed intimacy between humans, animals and plants, and the healing of the earth.

Thanks for indulging me in this grandiose review of 2013. Each Monday I'll be posting material relating to text, sound and ecstatic consciousness, the magic and ritual of performance. I'll also be posting monthly interviews.

Addendum:

A few more cool things from 2013 are Murderous Vision and Polar Envy downloads on Bandcamp  and the Four on the Noise Floor compilation by Sam Harmon - what treats!